Newspapers

Advance Publications is cutting back production at four of its newspapers. The largest is New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune, but Alabama’s The Press-Register, The Huntington Times and The Birmingham News are all going to cut back to publishing only three times a week. It’s sad not only because communities depend on their local papers, but also because staffers will surely be dropped as a result of Advance’s announcement.

So how did the papers deal with it? Below a look at the front pages of the Times-Picayune, the Press-Register, the Huntington Times and the Birmingham News.

The Times-Picayune went big, with four out of the five stories dealing with the reduction.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

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Warren Buffett is going to buy more newspapers. Yes, in addition to the 63 his Berkshire Hathaway Media Group scooped up last week. In a letter sent to the editors and publishers of those publications, Buffett says he “will probably purchase more papers in the next few years.” While that’s not a concrete statement, Buffett is a big newspaper fan, so it’s going to happen.

Not only is Buffett going to buy more papers, in the memo — which was obtained by Jim Romenesko via The Omaha-World Herald — he even outlines where they’ll likely be found:

We will favor towns and cities with a strong sense of community, comparable to the 26 in which we will soon operate. If a citizenry cares little about its community, it will eventually care little about its newspaper. In a very general way, strong interest in community affairs varies inversely with population size and directly with the number of years a community’s population has been in residence. Therefore, we will focus on small and mid-sized papers in long-established communities.

If your town qualifies, get ready. Buffett, the Savior of Small Newspapers, is coming to save your beloved publication.

Unless he dies first. But even then, we bet he puts your little paper in his will. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and FishbowlNY loves him for it.

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The danger of writing about correct punctuation is that if you get something wrong, you end up looking kind of foolish. Such is the case with The New York Times article “The Most Comma Mistakes,” which details the many silly comma errors that everyone makes.

We read through the examples and realized that we have been guilty of a few of the errors, but then — much to our delight — we noticed the author had messed up too. The Times issued the following correction at the bottom of the piece:

In an earlier version of this article, the example involving ‘Midnight in Paris’ mistakenly said a comma was needed after the name ‘Jessie,’ rather than before it.

So the Times’ article about correct comma usage had a misplaced comma. It’s comforting to know that, isn’t it?

We now patiently await someone to point out our comma mistake in this post.

[h/t Daily Intel]

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Arthur Brisbane, The New York Times’ Public Editor, is leaving his post in September. The Washington Post reports that Brisbane made the decision to leave last fall. Brisbane was the fourth Public Editor appointed by the Times.

Brisbane will surely be remembered for his ridiculously awful column that asked if the New York Times should report facts. If you missed it, do yourself a favor and go back and give it a read. It’s truly an amazing piece.

So, you wanna be EIC, huh? Depending on the size of the publication and the stability of the market — which, let’s face it, has not been that kind to print publications lately — the magazine masthead is not the playground of overnight sensations. You can, however, climb the editorial ladder with a little strategy and lots of hard work. For example…

Sign up for the un-spectacular.

You know those grunt assignments that nobody else wants? Take ‘em. They’re like little learning boot camps, said Marie Claire features director Lea Goldman, who found unique value in a notoriously tedious task.

“When I started out, transcripts and fact checking were the most useful things I did because they taught me how to put together a story,” she remembered. “I often just copied the source with the head of an organization and add that name and number to my Rolodex like, ‘OK, that’s a source. Now, I know if I’m ever working on a story like this, I can call that person.’ So they’re very useful and they shouldn’t be dismissed as just scut work.”

To find out how other magazine veterans got promoted, read How To Become an Editor-in-Chief.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

 

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